The Internet has been evolved from a human-centered connectivity network where humans generate and consume information into an Internet of Things (IoT) network that where distributed entities such as things send, receive and process information without human intervention. Internet of Everything (IoE) technologies combined with IoT, such as big data processing technologies through connection with a cloud server, for example, have also emerged. To implement IoT, various technologies, such as sensing technology, wired/wireless communication and network infrastructure, service interfacing technology, and security technology are required, and recently, even technologies for sensor network, Machine to Machine (M2M), Machine Type Communication (MTC) for connection between things are being studied.
Such an IoT environment may provide intelligent Internet Technology (IT) services that create a new value to human life by collecting and analyzing data generated among connected things. IoT may be applied to a variety of areas including smart home, smart building, smart city, smart car or connected car, smart grid, health care, smart home appliances and advanced medical services through convergence and combination between existing Information Technologies (IT) and various industrial applications.
Meanwhile, to share content (e.g., songs, movies, music videos, pictures, video clips, images, etc.) created by or stored in a terminal, multiple stages of operation should be performed. For example, as for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (BT), procedures of discovering, selecting, connecting a device, etc., are required. As for a short-range wireless communication, such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, Infrared communication, and near-field communication (NFC), operation of bringing user devices face to face with each other is required, making it difficult to share content among multiple devices.
Furthermore, in sharing a content created by or stored in a terminal, it is difficult to identify a device that intends to share the content, and the user has to be aware of a name and serial number (SN) of a device for connection between devices.
Thus far, the created content can be shared after Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi) connection is performed. However, if the created content is shared for a long period of time, battery consumption of the terminal grows due to the Wi-Fi connection.
Furthermore, for device connection, the user has thus far selected a device in a Wi-Fi device search screen in the terminal. There is, however, a problem with mapping between the terminal and the device.
In addition, thus far, the terminal may be connected to respective devices by NFC tagging, but the connection is possible only one to one, causing inconvenience because the terminal has to do NFC tagging with multiple devices to share content with the multiple devices.